Paralleling the transition into a technology-dependent era, schools offer various online resources for teachers and students alike to get their hands on and utilize at their will. The question that remains is this: how many students are actually taking advantage of these websites, and how much is our school investing in these websites?
Sophomore Pratyusha Anumala said, “I’ve never used Turnitin.com or Questia. My teachers never used it before.”
Questia, along with Turnitin.com, is one of the major websites that most Seminole County public schools, including Seminole High School, use. Questia describes itself as “the premier online research and paper writing resource.” Bookkeeper Mrs. Rollie Nelson said that Questia costs the school $4500 per year.
Turnitin.com primarily functions as a plagiarism detector for student-submitted papers. Some colleges, such as University of Central Florida, also use Turnitin.com. Seminole High School pays $6300 annually to access it. Turnitin and Questia combined cost the school close to eleven-thousand dollars each year. The school also purchases smaller websites aimed at specific subjects such as social studies, math, and reading for around $200-300 for each website to go along with the curriculum.
Senior Jonathan R. Bryant said, “I don’t use Questia. I don’t know what it is but I think I’ve heard of it.”
Educational Technology Facilitator Ms. Patti Boggs stated that all major academic websites that schools in the district use are decided on a county level. Individual schools receive a “menu” of which websites are available, and choose from the menu the websites they would like to purchase. State-governed websites (such as FCAT Explorer) are automatically paid for by the county and do not come out of the school budget.
There can be many benefits from taking advantage of these school websites. Many teachers do use the online resources available to them as well as encourage their students to do the same.
Senior Alex Chen commented, “Questia is useful to get sources for papers like history IA. I’ve used it for my history IA and my freshman research paper.”
Although the county regularly sends out statistics of how often such websites are being used, further research may prove the numbers to be somewhat unreliable as the actual amount of students who use the websites seems to fluctuate.